SPEL completes another semester of storytelling that builds skills and community
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Amid heat waves and a packed summer of exciting World Cup games and celebrations of the country’s 250th anniversary, the Hola Cultura Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning, or SPEL, team produced stories and content highlighting the Latine community while learning about journalism in a changing world. On July 28, interns and fellows wrapped up another successful semester.
The weekly virtual sessions featured guest speakers Steven Sapienza, a senior editor at the Pulitzer Center, and Mariana Sánchez-Santos, an artificial intelligence researcher at Spotify. Sapienza, who collaborates with newsrooms and journalists, talked about his experience in documentary making and opportunities for freelance journalists. Sanchez-Santos led an informative discussion about the most recent findings about AI and its influence on the journalism industry.
Among the team of 15 interns, Madison Forrest is a recent graduate from Boston University where she studied journalism and Spanish. She said she was drawn toward Hola Cultura because it aligned with her future career goals and appreciated that it is a bilingual publication.
One of the weekly sessions that stood out to her was Professional Development Night that was toward the end of the semester. Three guest speakers, Francisco Vara-Orta from Investigative Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting investigative journalists; author Lorenza Ortiz, who writes for Hola Cultura’s book column, Hola Escritores and former Hola Cultura assistant editor Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe all shared some insight on their careers and advice for young journalists, artists and writers.
Forrest said Ortiz was so excited about writing. “It was cool to get her perspective on things because like the past four years I’ve just been getting the journalism side of career development. She said that every time she was on a plane, she had to write, so then the next time I went on a plane… I had to write.”
Another important part of the semester was the collaborative projects from the Boston and D.C. oral history teams. One of the projects included interns Melody Marichalar and Marvin Juarez hosting a charla about their work on the East Boston COVID-19 memorial project, a series of articles discussing the impact of the pandemic and today’s ICE raids on the Latine community. Other interns continued working on their oral history projects on Latine street muralists in the DMV.
SPEL’s Society & Culture and Arts & Humanities editorial interns pitched and wrote their own stories on topics that interested them. Forrest decided to write about a salsa and bachata dance class in Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston that she had not known much about before writing her article. In addition to individual stories, the social media and editorial interns collaborated on a World Cup watch party story that was a collection of vignettes of different gatherings throughout the country and Canada.
Joaquín Selva, the Society and Culture editorial fellow, has been a writer and an editor for many publications over the course of his career, but he was excited to explore journalism at Hola Cultura. Selva appreciated the real connections he made despite the program being remote.
He remembered a weekly meeting after some members of the Hola Cultura team went to the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference and came back to share their experiences. Selva said it felt like the whole team got to experience some of that conference.
Selva also mentioned how he was drawn toward Hola Cultura’s mission of reporting on the Latine community. He said he previously worked for the state of Oklahoma where, in Selva’s office, even mentioning Latine identity was oftentimes off limits after the Trump administration took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives last year.
“It’s a scary time to put a bullseye on your back,” Selva said. “I feel like Hola Cultura is just a great way to almost sidestep all that. It’s not even a question that we’re going to focus on community and that the bilingual aspect of it is going to be an important part of it, because that’s what we’re reporting on.”
Although the summer semester has come to an end, Hola Cultura will continue to nurture young journalists and work to bring Latine stories and voices to the forefront in semesters to come.
– Story by Eva Leon
– Copy edited by Valerie Izquierdo
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